Byron, after promising Shelley to bring Allegra to Pisa, arrived without her, and Claire, who had come expressly from Florence to wait about the city in the hopes of seeing the child, was horribly alarmed on learning she had been left in the convent of Bagna-Cavallo. Her Italian friends gave her a sinister description of this convent, set down in the middle of the marshes of the Romagna, and in the most unhealthy climate. The nuns—Capucins—ignored hygiene, fed the children disgracefully, and did not warm them at all. Claire could not see a fire without thinking of her poor little darling who never saw or felt a cheerful blaze. This high-spirited young woman was brought, through maternal anguish, to an abnegation that was sublime. She wrote to Byron that she would renounce ever seeing Allegra again so long as she lived, if he would consent to put her in a good English School. “I can no longer resist,” she said, “the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her any more.” Byron made no reply. There was some talk amongst Claire’s friends of rescuing Allegra by stratagem, but Shelley begged her to have patience. While agreeing with her as to Byron’s cruelty, he disapproved of thoughtless violence. . . . “Lord Byron is inflexible and you are in his power. Remember, Claire, when you rejected my earnest advice, and checked me with that contempt which I had never merited from you at Milan and how vain is now your regret! This is the second of my sibylline volumes. If you wait for the third, it may be sold at a still higher price.” He called upon Byron to plead Claire’s cause, but the moment Byron heard her name he gave an impatient shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, women can’t exist without making scenes!” Shelley told him what Claire had heard about the unsuitability of the convent. “What do I know about it?” he said. “I have never been there.” Then, when Claire’s anguish and her fears were described to him, a smile of malicious satisfaction passed over his face. “I had difficulty in restraining myself from knocking him down,” said Shelley afterwards at Lady Mountcashell’s. “I was furious but I was wrong. He can no more help being what he is than that door can help being a door.” But old Mr. Tighe told him, “You are quite wrong in your fatalism. If I were to horsewhip that door it would still remain a door, but if Lord Byron were well horsewhipped my opinion is he would become as humane as he is now inhumane. It’s the subserviency of his friends that makes him the insolent tyrant he is.” On hearing of Shelley’s failure, Claire fell into such despair that Mary and Shelley would not allow her to return to Florence alone amongst strangers. They were going to spend the summer at the sea with the Williamses and they invited her to go with them.